XP Pro only sometimes boots

vates · #1 10-24-2005, 12:07 PM

I just installed a fresh copy of XP Professional. I installed all the programs and configured it exactly how I wanted it. Then I made an image using Ghost.

Now, most of the time when I start my computer or simply reboot, I get a disk not detected or failed/can’t boot error (I don’t remember the exact name of the error at this time but it basically can’t find my boot files… I believe). Anyway, I’ll power down and try again, Windows XP will not boot. I might try this sequence of rebooting 6 or 7 times. After I keep trying I can finally get it to boot my XP operating system and everything works just fine. Then when I shut down later on and start it back up it’ll take 6 or 7 times for it to boot again. It’s like it won’t “catch” the boot files when rebooting. Before I was just loading my Ghost image each time this would happen, but I finally figured out 6 or 7 restarts is what it takes to boot up to XP. And when it does boot I’ll sometimes get the screen of “booting into safe mode/Last known good configuration/etc. I always choose start Windows normally option.

Now here’s some background. Before this problem I had 2 identical 200GB hard drives in my machine. One had the XP and my data. The other I would save a ghost image of the other drive and a backup copy of all my data. And then the operating system drive failed. Better yet, both drives failed simultaneously. Very weird I thought. Well it turns out I luckily had a third identical hard drive not being used in the system at that time. I unscrewed the hard drive board and replaced it on the non-working drives. They both worked now as long as I would use the good hard drive board on the drive I wanted.

Then I took one of the failed drives and the good hard drive board, loaded XP, did the ghost image, etc. (read the beginning of this message and insert here)

Any ideas why my computer only sometimes boots? I can’t figure if its hardware or software related, although I’m leaning toward hardware. But what makes be believe it’s not hardware is that my drive is always detected by the BIOS whether it boots or not.

And I did a fixboot and fixmbr too.

Please help me out with this issue if you can. If I didn’t give enough info then let me know. Thanks.

Cache · #2 10-24-2005, 06:53 PM

Have you tried a new IDE cable? assuming thats what cables your drives use that is.

What do you mean by "drive board"?
What type of dive are they i.e ATA, SATA, SCSI ?
What is the exact error message?

vates · #3 10-25-2005, 09:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cache

Have you tried a new IDE cable? assuming thats what cables your drives use that is.

What do you mean by "drive board"?
What type of dive are they i.e ATA, SATA, SCSI ?
What is the exact error message?

I'll try another cable and see if it solves the problem. I'm not sure it'll work because the drive is always detected when the machine is turned on. It just only sometimes boots to XP. It is an ATA hard drive (200GB Maxtor Diamondmax). I don't have the exact error message as I'm at work now, but it's the typical cannot find a disk to boot from error/Insert system disk.

By the drive board, I mean the actual board on the hard drive. I unscrewed it and replaced it with another one.

It pretty much can't find anything to boot from (like when you leave a non-bootable floppy in your drive accidently and try starting up your machine - that's if the floppy is set to boot before the HDD).